Status Update

I am not working. That means I must be broken, right?

Green Shoots

When I came back to the cottage, no one else was here. I sat outside in the cold sunshine, glass of wine in hand, and watched the stags stand in silhouette against the sky on the brow of the hill.  It was so quiet I could hear the wings of the birds beating as they flew over. Catkins are thick on the branches by the stream.

It has been a long time since I could bear to be alone with my thoughts like this. I am resolved to grow a little stronger every day.

Busman's Holiday

London. In which the Kitten is ironically, pointlessly, upgraded to an Executive Plus room (Plus what?) which she is enjoying in splendid, pristine and virginal isolation. Proving that her charms still work on hotel receptionists  -  although that appears to be as far as they stretch, nowadays.

Technically, I am still on holiday in Somerset (as you can see).  Lightly interspersed with a bit of lecturing and a board meeting.  Hell, I'd much rather facilitate a workshop on sourcing strategies than have a nice day in Somerset with my Terrible Tweenagers and my lovely friends. Wouldn't I? Ho hum.  This hotel is the largest Holiday Inn in the world (wow!) but it still doesn't feel like a holiday. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough.

Being away from work for a few days has given me the space and time to stop worrying so much about work, and start worrying about other things instead. My writing, mainly. Who would have thought it would be this easy to find another whole field in which to feel like an impostor? So many new things to fail at. The world is truly my lobster.

Dictionary of Stones

The rumble of the grey pebbles at the shoreline, the syncopated spacing of the grey breakwaters against the grey sea and the grey sky, the grey silhouettes of the trees on the hill  -  they all hold their messages, if only I could decipher them. 

A black and white landscape, where mermaids have traced their poems onto the stones in salty codes. Where the shapes and placing of the rocks, coloured like pigeons, so carefully co-ordinated by the sea, have a significance that I strain to understand.

These things are too beautiful to be random. They must have a meaning, surely they must?  What are they trying to tell me?

I scoured the skyline for the scribble of geese in flight, in case their mysterious heiroglyphics could give me a clue to the cipher.  I sniffed the air, and tasted its tang but it could not teach me its secret. I looked for the perfect stone to bring you, the one that would tell you everything simply from its smoothness and heft. You could just touch it and you would know. 

I remember once I went to a beach where the stones were like perfect white eggs and told a different story, a story of sunshine and myths. Porlock tells of something more melancholy. 

Wheat and Chaff

One thing a period of depression teaches you is who your real friends are.  It gives people an opportunity to show you their best  -  or their worst.

A person who is ill with depression is not good company. She doesn't have the emotional energy to initiate anything - events, phone conversations, trips, get-togethers.  She doesn't have sparkling, witty conversational gambits. She doesn't return calls, because she has nothing to say. She pulls out of arrangements all the time because she doesn't feel up to it.

And the people who like her because she's fun and lively and full of ideas, think up lots of ideas of things to do for themselves, and do them anyway, and find new lively folk to keep them company.

And the people who like her just because they like her, they are the ones still standing shoulder to shoulder with her at the end of the dark time. The people who left her messages on her phone and her Facebook and pushed through the letterbox. "No need to reply, I was just thinking about you". Who were happy to walk down the road for a coffee and a cake for an hour, or pop their head around the door of the office or the kitchen just to say hi and give her a hug. The people who knew she could not speak, could not explain the grey curtain that had come down between her and the rest of the world, but sat patiently on the other side of it just so she knew they were there.

If you had broken your leg snowboarding, and had to fly home by air-ambulance; or been in a spectacular car smash; or even having a hernia repaired or fibroids cauterized or something completely unglamorous and non-dramatic; everyone would still understand that you were ill. Lots of people would visit with flowers, and cards, offer to help out with the kids or the cooking.

Depression is not like that. Its grey darkness leaches out to anyone who gets too close. It's the 21st century Black Death, daubing its invisible cross on the door. Yet when she emerges, blinking in the unfamiliar sunshine, trying to find her centre of gravity like a new born calf lifting itself onto suddenly-discovered legs; her true friends, the people whom she loves and who love her back, are there waiting.

And she knew they were there all along, because they had crushed their notes and crammed their fingers and whispered their care through the cracks and faults in the tired, sticky creosote-black splintery wood of her misery shed, and said, "We are here. Always".

And every one of their kindnesses took a stone from her pocket until she could break the surface of her life and breathe again.

Spring

Somerset. In which the Kitten decides, like Kate Middleton, to make her own destiny.

I confess I was irritated by this statement when Wills fatuously, inevitably fatuously, made it in his interview.  I felt it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of destiny, if you are prepared to countenance such a concept in the first place.  Coupled with the gift of That Ring, I don't rate her chances.

Since I have now survived four days - four whole days! - without the aid of serotonin-enhancing drugs, things could be looking up.  The restorative warmth of the company of friends is better than any medicine. We had a long walk in the spring sunshine, and saw snowdrops, pheasants, catkins and a rabbit.

Maybe the worst is over.

Sparkly Smiles

I stole this picture, because it made me happy.

It has been a long wait, too long, for someone to love this lovely woman the way she deserves. For someone to put his toothbrush next to hers on the side of the basin not sometimes but every day, and call the same place Home. Smiling their shy and shiny smiles :-)

Frumpet

And so we got chatting. This and that, still polite.

“What do you do?” he asked.

I’m still always slightly thrown by that question. Where I come from, it’s not a question people ask. They simply enquire, “Are you working?”

We can have a little fun, maybe even a little flirting here, I thought, suddenly. “Why don’t you guess?” I hoped I had a slightly mischievous twinkle in my question.

“Well.” He paused. “From the look of you, I reckon it’s easy to tell”.

Go on then.

“I’m going to guess that you work as a lawyer for a local authority. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Well holy, holy fuck. Drastic total makeover? Immediate suicide? Burst into tears and have a breakdown? I’m not sure of the correct response.

Chewing the Cud

So what am I doing on Valentine's Day? Spending the evening with a man who loves me to bits and thinks I'm wonderful?

Ah, yes. I remember now. He's a figment of my imagination. Oh, bollocks.

So, due to the disappointing non-existence of this imaginary Man Of My Dreams, I am instead going with my friend to read love poems at a Valentine's Day event.  And no, the irony of this is not lost on me.

I have written some new pieces for this. One, A Maiden's Prayer On Valentine's Day, is based on an Elvis Presley love-song.  The other, coming along well, is based on an old blogpost (Tuesday 8 June 2010, if you're interested).

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. Plato

Mutton

And I said to myself, "Just who are you trying to kid?"

And I bought black trousers, and a minimiser bra, and two plain V neck sweaters.

Harry's Bar

This weekend I have mostly been eating pies.

Well, that's not strictly true, but I did share a pie from the chip shop last night, and I made fish pie today. Which is a different sort of pie really. Nonetheless, it made me remember the poem I started last year, so I've been trying to work that through a bit.

It's about a fella called Neil Collier, in the middle of that lovely picture, who recently became the World Pie Eating Champion.  As carefully regulated as an Olympic sport, the annual contest takes place in Lancashire. Neil ate his pie in under 24 seconds, halving last year's winning attempt of 47 seconds.  It is held in a joint called Harry's Bar, although no mention is made of Bellinis (it being Wigan, after all).

Last time I went to Wigan (which was some time ago, admittedly), I was waiting for a taxi and overhead two men talking about their weight-lifting competition and the diets they were following. One of them swore by high-protein, steaks and such. The other was favouring oily fish. He mentioned tuna, mackerel, pilchards.

"Are pilchards fooking fish?" asked Meathead, in amazement.

I decided to find out more about the background to the pie-eating contest. It has an interesting 20 year history with a number of scandals and upsets along the way.  It is the responsibility of the previous year's reigning champion to look after the pies overnight before the competition, and last year it nearly had to be called off at the last minute. Most of the correctly-prepared pies (with the regulation gravy, properly-diced meat cubes etc) were stolen from the fridge and eaten by the champion's dog, who got into the fridge when it was left open as the champ rushed away to rescue a racing pigeon which had become trapped in his chimney.

Talk about comedy Northern cliches - you couldn't make it up, could you? There's got to be a performance poem in that, just got to be.

Prozac or Nozac?

This is the Period of Resignation, and this is all there is.

So one inevitable consequence is that the anti-depressants and the painkillers have to go in the bin. I know my Quiz of Week recommended that I carry on taking the tablets, but I can't think of them as a way to get me through  -  because there is no "through".

Things are as they are, and I need to deal with that, face it head on. It was a coping strategy of sorts to think that the Period of Shittiness might pass in a hazy chemical blur, but now I need to get on with trying to live life as it is. There are to be no perks, or escapes; no magical interludes, or tenderness, or intimacy.

My hugs will be from my kids, and my girlfriends  - that's a lot of warmth and kindness.

And the other stuff? The electric blue of kingfisher and dragonfly are woven into my fabric now.

Resignation

It being the Period of Resignation and all, I didn’t so much as bat an eyelid when my committee friend Issy told me she has been diagnosed with secondary cancer in her lungs, liver and bone. She’s thirty-two.

This ought to jolt me into a sense of proportion about my own whining, but of course it didn’t.

I’m not whining about anything any more: I’m resigned. It’s the realisation that you’ve slipped over the peak of the parabola. Oh, if only you’d known that you were cheering your final hurrah, how much you would have savoured it! How much more carefully you would have cherished those moments where you were cherished, and held much more attentively in your mind’s eye those moments where you were held in someone else’s arms.

It’s a gradual process, like a mist coming in from the sea. Almost imperceptible to begin with. Small things, small steps, small moments. Then before you know it, it doesn’t matter which day you wear your nice bra and which day you don’t. Or your nice pants. And after a few weeks you realise the latest lingerie you bought is never coming out of its package, labels still intact, and you take it back to the shop for a refund, mumbling something about gift, wrong size, and use the money to buy a jumper instead.

And you stop using that nice brand of body lotion, because no one is going to come close enough to smell your skin. And then you stop shaving under your arms as a matter of course, and only bother if you’re wearing a sleeveless top. And then you stop shaving your legs entirely, because heck no one is gonna see them, just wear trousers and boots. Chuck the stockings and wear some winter tights. And you run out of that special conditioner that made your hair silky and scented, because no one will be running their hands through it now except maybe your hairdresser.

And you stop wearing the tits-n-heels outfits that made you, for a ridiculous late-blooming moment, feel sexy; and realise that you are a fool, that you are mutton dressed as mutton. And you go back to wearing black trousers suits. And you see your confident red coat is wearing out and you replace it with a black one. And you jam your flamboyant multicoloured, twisted silk scarves in a cheery carnival knot at the back of the drawer and wonder what the hell you were thinking.

And maybe you will sit in a restaurant with someone who used to pant after you, and beg to fuck your brains out, and realise that you are utterly resistible.

And you will accept the inevitability of this, and the knowledge will sit forever in your chest like a stone, and you will say nothing, and smile and sip your wine, and feel grateful for any small smile or kindness.

For this is the Period of Resignation, and this is all there is.

Capitulation

And so the Period of Shittiness has squished its tentacles right through the centre of the earth and popped out its suckers in Sydney.

For sure we've all laughed about Charlie Sheen, but when he turns out to be your brother-in-law's secret alter ego, it's not quite so funny. I mean, it's all very well living your life as one glorious, heroic shag-marathon, but not if you've got a wife and family who have followed you to the other side of the world to make a fresh sunshiney, family-focused start.

It's a long way away. Too far. You can't hug someone over Skype. Or punch them for that matter.

And yet the Period of Shittiness cannot remain for ever. It's a new month, and lifes moves inexorably on. February is usually my worst time, but January has aced all previous records so I'm alternately fearful, and hopeful, about February now.  And the flow of days and weeks and months insists that we have a direction of travel.

And so the Period of Shittiness is gradually becoming the Period of Resignation.  Give in to it. Let it take you. It has a sort of comforting grey embrace  -  and it might be the only hug a girl can get.